Vern Nelson: Get rid of your leaf-chomping earwigs with a 'hotel' you make from a flower pot

View full sizeWIKIMEDIA COMMONS Earwigs use those scary-looking rear-mounted pincers to maneuver food and during mating.

Earwigs (Forficula auricularia and others) have always given me the creeps. As a child I believed that their rear-mounted pincers were dangerous to people. Actually, the pincers are used to manipulate food and during mating.

Earwigs, common in the kitchen garden, are omnivores: They eat plant material such as flowers, corn silk, vegetable seedlings and tender leaves, as well as insects such as aphids and insect eggs. So it turns out that I was worried about the wrong end of the earwig.

If you are tired of finding chewed flowers and ragged vegetable starts but don't want to use insecticides, you can make earwigs' love of dark, confined spaces work for you. Here's how:

Use a 6-inch-diameter terra cotta pot as an earwig hotel. Turn the pot upside down and pass a piece of twine through the drain hole from above. Tie the end of the twine to a washer that is a bit bigger than the hole (which is about 3/4 inch wide) so that it holds the pot.

Stuff the pot with straw. I use dirty straw from the poultry coop, but new straw works well. Hang the pot, upside down, from a branch. Earwigs cruising your fruit trees will find the pot and hide there. Empty it regularly, every day or two. My chickens love it when I empty the pots into their run. This is best done on clear ground so that the chickens can easily find the earwigs.

Straw-filled pots set near or on the compost pile also draw earwigs. No string or washer is needed. Or you can use pieces of corrugated cardboard tied to tree trunks or laid in the garden to attract them.

TIPS

Use pots with vertical or nearly vertical sides, which hold on to the straw better than pots with wider tops.*

Use twine made from organic material. It is usually less slick and easier for the earwig to traverse.

If you don't havepoultry to gobble up the insects, you can drown or burn them.

* I have never had to use anything to hold the straw in. Hardware cloth bent over the wide lip to friction fit or fastened with wire would work, as would plastic mesh. Or you could try a strip of duct tape. Since the straw is tangled and tends to hold together, a single strip of duct tape will suffice. Duct tape will stick to glazed pots better than to terra cotta. As terra cotta gets wet the duct tape may come loose.